Daily Slow Chat

9 comments

1. Do you still use ATMs much where you live?

   In some countries they seem to be disappearing rapidly! Here in Italy (I’m in Naples today) they are still relatively easy to find.

2. BTW…I just remembered one (marginally interesting) thing about ATMs.

   When I lived in Japan,a local guy told me that you could take any amount of money from an ATM there,as long as you had it in your account.Neither a minimum nor a maximum withdrawal.

   So,I decided to try and take the minimum.One yen.

   It actually worked! I got one little coin that was worth about a cent.

   Ok,it cost me like 100yen to make the withdrawal, but it was worth it for the experience 😉

3. Gawd it’s so dark in the morning. Yawn. It does seem like it’ll be a lovely day, though.

   Today’s prompt is castle. Seeing that I drew orangebikini’s castle in ink not too long ago (and my hand fell off in the process) I am not overly inclined to draw another one. Maybe I can use a different technique or something. Which brings me to the question.

   Are you much of a purist? If there’s a challenge to draw something with ink for a whole month, would you say screw it and switch to pastels halfway? Do you care if there’s the right kind of guanciale in your carbonara or that your knitting yarn is 110% hand-spun wool? You get what I mean. I think I am a purist with very few things (mostly related to old music), most of the time I don’t care. I had a roommate who would rather starve than swap one of the ingredients in Pad Thai because he didn’t have it at hand.

4. You know, visiting Hiroshima would be kind of awkward for me. Knoxville’s one claim to international notoriety is being near the Oak Ridge facilities that enriched uranium (also some plutonium production went on as one of the first nuclear reactors in the world was built) for the first atomic bombs. Pretty much everyone around here is proud of that. Part of those facilities became a national laboratory that also works on civilian stuff while the other part remained a uranium processing/storage complex. Both still employ lots of people and contractors.

   I remember kids with scientific aptitude were encouraged to keep those two places in mind because they’re quite prestigious places to work. I even found a photo of someone at my department in my university working on the Manhattan project. Heck I know people close to me/acquaintances who work at those facilities and similar ones around the country. I myself would like to get in somewhere too…

   Visiting Hiroshima is still on my bucket list though.

5. Day of election silence in Poland today, meaning talking about politics is banned. The TV right now is hilarious – one of the major news channels is currently showing world’s biggest pumpkins. Followed by a program about bees. And one about possible scenarios of the end of the world.

6. Is September-October a good time to visit Frankfurt?

7. I have a difficult decision to make. My summer car is from the late 70s and thus from a time before licence plates having country codes on them. So the rear window has one of those oval country code stickers, which you actually still see on some Swiss cars at least. Anyway, the sticker is [giga old and worn](https://i.imgur.com/HTCv7TN.jpg), but I like it because it’s the old code for Finland, SF instead of FIN.

   It’s starting to get so worn though that it just looks bad. I’m trying to decide if I should just scrape it off, or get a new one that also says SF and replace it. I’m just afraid that if I slap a new sticker on it it’ll look too new and clean and it’ll be an eyesore. Maybe I should buy one and leave it in the sun for like two years, age it a bit first. I’ll decide in the spring, it’s getting time to put the car into hibernation anyway.

   I’m thinking of going to the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm next year. I haven’t been in Stockholm in ages, and there isn’t really any opera on the calendar in Helsinki that I’m dying to see.

8. I have 5 days to spend on a city trip in mid November. I can find super cheap tickets to these 3 cities and I need you guys’ opinions on which one to choose.

   Skopje, North Macedonia

   Bucharest, Romania

   Belgrade, Serbia

   Some qualities I like; walkability, local food and drinks, nice museums and parks. I’ll most likely be traveling alone.

9. Well, I went to the Nokia N-Gage exhibition today that I mentioned a couple of days ago. Such a [2000s nostalgia fest](https://i.imgur.com/LwD7l5y.jpg). The main takeaways seemed to be that the N-Gage really was ahead of its time when it comes to mobile gaming, and that the iPhone in 2007 was even aheader of its time.

   There was a bunch of phones from different manufacturers representing different design choices, all from 2007, and in the middle the original iPhone. All the others had all kinds of buttons, they slid open, flipped open, twisted around, they had numpads, qwerty-keyboards, secondary displays, weird cameras, and so on. And in the middle there is this black rectangle that has just a touchscreen with one button under it.

   The exhibition had a little nook dedicated to the various PR disasters related to the N-Gage, none of which I was aware of, and the banned British ad campaign that u/holytriplem mentioned was among them. They had a news paper clipping from Helsingin Sanomat from the time detailing the ban, and next to it a slideshow of those ads.

   Whatever marketing agency handled Nokia’s campaigns in the UK at that time, I hope they know their shit is in a museum now.

   Edit: for some Finnish 2000s nostalgia vibes, here is [Viimeinen](https://youtu.be/0SfKkLqQtP4?si=UvK4l0-b4O7CsQzA&t=45) by Nylon Beat. Some of the best Finnish pop from that era, love it.